Designing new materials depends upon understanding the properties of today's materials. One such material, Nafion, is a polymer that efficiently conducts ions (a polymer electrolyte) and water through its ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Studies done by Mark Lusk and colleagues at the Colorado School of Mines could significantly improve the efficiency of solar cells. Their latest work describes how the size of light-absorbing ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Northwestern University researchers have developed a new technique for rapidly prototyping nanoscale devices and structures that is so inexpensive the "print head" can be thrown away when ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Northwestern University have placed nanocrystals of rock salt into lead telluride, creating a material that can harness electricity from heat-generating items such as vehicle exhaust systems, ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Cornell researchers have developed a new method to create a patterned single-crystal thin film of semiconductor material that could lead to more efficient photovoltaic cells and batteries.

The ability of phase-change materials to readily and swiftly transition between different phases has made them valuable as a low-power source of non-volatile or “flash” memory and data storage. Now an ...

Researchers at Oregon State University have reported the successful loading of biological molecules onto "nanosprings" - a type of nanostructure that has gained significant interest in recent years for its ...

"There is a strong drive to make smaller and smaller devices," Hui Cao tells PhysOrg.com. "However, there are limitations to what we can do. We want faster devices than what we can get from electronics, so we are looking ...

The materials chitin and chitosan found in the shells are abundant and significantly cheaper to produce than the expensive metals such as ruthenium, which is similar to platinum, that are currently used in ...

NIST researchers have demonstrated the autonomous computer-controlled assembly of atoms into perfect nanostructures using a low temperature scanning tunneling microscope. The results, published in an invited ...

MIT biological engineers have created a new computer model that allows them to design the most complex three-dimensional DNA shapes ever produced, including rings, bowls, and geometric structures such as icosahedrons that ...